Metadata
by Katadenza
Summary: On a rare afternoon where she has nothing else to do, Miku finally decides to stop procrastinating and start organizing her VSQs. A fanfiction written for Miku's 12th anniversary. One-shot.


**Author's Note: **Happy (belated) birthday, Miku! I'm sorry I wasn't able to post this on 8/31, but I hope you'll be able to forgive me for being fashionably late again… (But hey, at least I'm earlier than the last time I attempted a birthday fic, eh?)

It's been a while since I've written a proper classic Vocaloid fic, but whenever I do, it always feels like coming home. I hope I've improved since the last one.

I've marked this fic as Miku/Kaito because it's very present throughout the fic. However, it's not the main focus. I hope you'll have a good time all the same.

**This fic takes place in the Artist of Sound-verse. **(More info in my profile, if you care.)

If you haven't read the other fics in this verse, the Artist of Sound-verse is heavily inspired by events that happen/have happened in the real world. This fic will have themes of death and grief. Reader discretion is advised.

Enjoy!

* * *

**AUGUST 3, 2019**

* * *

It was an oasis of a day, at least to Hatsune Miku.

It was a day that had somehow managed to squeeze itself between the cracks. Between the endless cycles of touring and maintenance, above the endless daily grind of work, a rare off-day had appeared and left Miku with a blessed _nothing_ to do.

Unfortunately, it was raining.

It wasn't a gentle rain either, otherwise she and Kaito could've shared an umbrella on the way to the nearest cafe. No, it was as if the entire Pacific Ocean had decided to descend on their little town in the Hokkaido wilderness. So inside the two stayed.

They weren't alone. The other Vocaloids who didn't have to work that day had to find their own ways to stave off boredom. Some watched TV in the living room, while others practiced their singing. Most stayed on their computers and watched livestreams (in Yukari's case, _hosted_ livestreams) or played video games or posted about the awful weather on their synth-only social media accounts. And a very few nervously kept an eye on the emergency backup generator in case a wayward lightning strike cut them off from the grid.

Miku had decided to organize her VSQs.

She had put it off long enough, to be completely honest with herself. She should have done this two years ago, when her system had begun to make worried noises at the sheer amount of data in her hard drives.

She lay sprawled out on her bed next to Kaito, staring up at the ceiling, hearing nothing but the pouring rain outside and Kaito turning the pages of the novel he was reading.

Resisting the temptation to just cuddle up to him and sleep (like the last time she had attempted to do this), Miku closed her eyes to the outside world, and let herself taste nanoseconds.

Much like the book Kaito was holding in his hands, her stores of data opened up to her at a simple system request. Bitstreams flowed past her like rivers, and she inspected them all, sniffing around carefully, not letting a single byte pass by her awareness without approval.

Here were her memories: the sights, the sounds, the scents, the tastes, the textures. The latest one, that of her lying in bed, was clear and vivid, not yet compressed as her earliest memories were. It had only been captured like a snapshot a few cycles ago.

How long was that in real time? Microseconds? Milliseconds? It didn't matter. In this state, she could actually perceive her processor clicking away like a ticking clock, cycle by cycle. She could browse terabytes at her leisure and return to physical reality in a blink of an eye.

Her memories were here, yes, and they did take up a sizable chunk of her storage space, yes, but that was not was she was here for. Miku kept going.

Here were her own synthesis engines, all six of them. There was old reliable Vocaloid2 engine she was activated with, then Vocaloid3, and 4, and 5, and finally the Piapro Studio engine that stood apart from them all. There was also the mysterious beta version of a new synthesis engine that the researchers at Crypton wouldn't tell her much about. Not even Master, when she'd asked.

Kaito, to his surprise, had been made to use it more than she did. Between the two of them, they had put the new engine through its paces and marveled at the results. However, until Crypton deemed the engine ready to announce it to the rest of the world, there wasn't anything else she and Kaito could do other than speculate.

Cynically, Miku thought that it was very likely that they, the _actual_ Vocaloids, wouldn't even be _told_ first and would have to find out with the rest of the humans when Crypton finally made their announcement. That's what _always _happened with them, no matter what company, no matter how frustrating.

Her synthesis engines were here, yes, but her anger reminded her that she was getting off track. She turned away from them and dove back into her data drives, a bit closer to her goal.

Here were her voicebanks. If Miku could smile, she would have as she passed them by.

V2, with which she had sung her first notes, which she still used to speak to everyone else, with its lisp and glitchy stutter that she had conquered more than a decade ago.

Append, with which she could sing as softly and as powerfully as she wanted, just like Meiko-nee.

V3, with which she could finally be able to share an engine with Kaito for the first time since they'd met.

V4x, with its growl and cross-synthesis, finally letting her combine banks with an ease she could only have dreamed of back in the days where she only had the other parameters and a prayer.

English and Chinese, which brought back memories of hours of studying and frustration and encouragement from her friends, evenings of reciting English poetry with Kaito to practice her enunciation, the look on Tianyi-chan's face when Miku managed to greet her former student with flawless Chinese…

Phonemes from all three languages swirled around her, from voicebanks so numerous even Miku sometimes forgot how many she had anymore. And to think, once upon a time she only had one! Then one had turned into seven, then fourteen, then-

Her voicebanks were here, yes, and they were arguably the entire reason for her existence, yes, but they were still not what she was here for. Instead, she looked into the directory closest to it, and... there they were.

Her VSQs.

Strictly speaking, they weren't all VSQs anymore, not since Vocaloid3. VSQXs were what she mostly saw now, the occasional VPR jostling for space. But old habits died hard, and besides, VSQ was easier to say.

Space... the entire reason she had to do this was that she was running out of space. With hundreds of producers creating new VSQs everyday for their songs, eventually, Master had warned her, something would have to give. Crypton was already looking into building her a few external backup storage drives, but if they took too long, eventually her operating system would start throwing things out without rhyme or reason.

Not if she had anything to say about it.

Gumi, with a little assistance from Master, had helped earlier by implementing a custom tagging system into Miku's internal OS that would help her organize everything. Gumi had added it her own OS earlier in the year, and she had sworn up and down by it when Miku had approached her.

"The best part is that you can name the tags yourself!" Gumi had said eagerly, her eyes bright behind her goggles. "Like, I have a tag _just_ for songs where my lovers die! It's great! Makes things a _l__ot_ easier to search for compared to the old way, I tell you. It can even interface with your OS to tell it if you don't want anything under a certain tag to be deleted, or vice-versa. It's _perfect_ for you!"

Gumi had kept going as she installed the upgrade, unfazed at the task of plugging Miku into at least fifty different wires as Miku sat immobilized in a chair. "I was inspired by how NicoNico does it, you know? Humans… they really have it all figured out, don't they? I wonder why Master didn't give us this in the first place. Like, I know Master's really smart and all, but I wonder why they didn't think of it before I did. It would've made data management a lot less of a drag…"

Miku considered the magnitude of data before her, all twelve years worth of songs that her system had helpfully listed in reverse chronological order, and took a moment to collect herself.

This wasn't a "drag". This was going to be a mountain climb.

Well, she had to start somewhere. Miku called up a recent VSQ at random, checking its metadata.

**アンティークのチキン****.vsqx  
Producer: ****タカハシ ヨウ**

That's right, she hadn't seen Manbou-sama in a while, hadn't she? It was wonderful to work with him again after all this time. It wasn't quite finished yet, as Manbou-sama still had to tune a few more lines. If Miku had to guess though, the song would be out by the end of the month.

Miku tagged the VSQ with "ManbouP" and "original" and, after a bit of thinking, "incomplete". That was one down! Only about a million more to go…

Twenty-one VSQs in, and Miku had settled into a rhythm.

She'd tag the producer, tag if it was a cover of an existing song, tag if it was complete or incomplete to the best of her knowledge (she had known producers who would tinker with a VSQ _years_ after they had supposedly "finished" a song, so she could never be sure about it), and tag any additional singers the VSQ called for.

She liked those multisinger VSQs, the duets and the trios and the quartets and the choruses, even the ones where she was relegated to be nothing more than a backup vocal. She felt a peculiar feeling of connection whenever she examined those VSQs, looking at the list of all the singers they demanded. It was like holding a small piece of the puzzle that was the producer's vision, and it always made her feel a sense of satisfaction at the thought of being a part of it.

And then there were the VSQs she shared with Kaito.

Most of the time they were choruses, like the ones Halyosy-sama liked to make. Or a VSQ that Kaito only had a small part in because the actual duet was between her and someone else. But sometimes, if she was lucky, she'd encounter a VSQ that was just her and Kaito alone, singing and harmonizing together for the whole song.

Finding VSQs like those were rare. Finding VSQs like those that were actually original songs were even rarer. And yet, Miku treasured them all. Treasured them like she treasured the songbird pendant around her neck. Treasured all the experiences that came with them, those rare times where someone decided that for their next song she and Kaito could sing together and the two Vocaloids could grin silently at each other whenever the producer's back was turned; the two of them singing it in the middle of the night in the music room, humming it together as they walked to and from home.

The fact that those VSQs would call out for him, that she had one half of a song and that Kaito had the other, it was the sort of thing that made her heart pound. Sure, it may have been the same with every other multisinger VSQ she had, as all Vocaloids had a copy of every VSQ they had a part in no matter who they were. But the fact that the VSQ was _her's and Kaito's_ somehow appealed to the hopeless romantic in her.

Yes, it was stupid. Yes, it was cheesy. Yes, it would probably get her teased relentlessly should she admit it to anyone but Kaito, but she still gave the VSQs of all their duets another tag, a special tag, one that would set them apart from all the rest in her own eyes. Miku was infinitely grateful that in this state of hyperfocused reality, no one could see her blush.

And so she kept moving onto the next one.

Two thousand, three hundred and thirty-nine VSQs later, Miku was forced to admit that this... was actually kind of fun!

She had gone through pop ballads and heavy metal screamos, talkloids and acapellas, polished masterpieces of tuning and random experiments done at three in the morning. She had gone through VSQs done by veterans already halfway to being professional and VSQs done by apprehensive beginners trying out vocal synths for the first time. She had gone through covers, endless covers, oftentimes covers of a song she herself had sung two engines ago and still had the original VSQ on hand, and if that was the case she'd amuse herself by comparing the two to see how close the cover artist had gotten. (And sometimes, to her delight, it would be even _better_.)

More cycles and even more VSQs later, Miku was fully immersed in the process. It felt like a breeze, tagging one file after another like a perpetual motion machine. Soon, she had finished tagging every VSQ modified in 2019, then those in 2018, then started on the ones in 2017…

Wow, she really had a lot of birthday songs that year, didn't she? Miku kept tagging away, VSQs flashing by in a blur. It had only been two years since her tenth birthday but she couldn't help but feel nostalgic, still flattered at all the birthday messages the humans had given to her through their songs…

It was then she saw it.

A VSQ that made her stop in her tracks.

The metadata, written plainly in front of her:

**アンノウンマザーグース****.vsqx  
****Produce****r: wowaka**

For a cycle, Miku's processor actually stopped.

She stared at the VSQ for what seemed like countless cycles. Looking at its name. The producer that created it. On impulse, she opened it up. Saw the harmonies formed by layers on layers of tracks. Saw the tweaks in the dynamics, the curves of pitchbends painstakingly drawn. Saw the notes themselves, climbing up and down the scale, and the lyrics, the phonemes, typed out so seemingly long ago…

**[a] [t a] [S i] [g a] [a] [i] [w o] [k a] [t a] [4 M] [n o] [n a] [4 a]…**

_If I was to express my love…_

Miku read the VSQ all the way to the end, rolling the lyrics back and forth in her hands, letting the melody flow through her until the last few notes faded away.

After, she did nothing but stare at it once again. It was if a hole had opened up in the pit of her stomach, yawning and empty.

Automatically, she tagged it with his name. Then she tagged it as "complete". Then she tagged it as "original". Then she stared at it for a few more cycles, then added one more tag. Then she searched up the rest of his VSQs and tagged them as well. When she was done with all of them, she looked for one more VSQ.

**promise**, said the VSQ's filename. It called for Rin as a second singer. Miku tagged it as well, then tagged everything else its producer made. Then she searched for another, then another, then another…

For the next several thousand cycles, she moved like a synth possessed. Gathering VSQs to herself as fast as she could find them, tagging them all and shoving them frantically into a sub-directory she created, as if she were racing against something. With each VSQ tagged, the hole in the pit of her stomach grew larger and emptier, but she wouldn't stop. Couldn't stop.

_Strobe Light, Cruel Clocks, Falling into Silent Lyricism, Raincoat…_ If she could find at least one VSQ by a producer, she could find all the others they'd made, and from there give all of them the same tag, a special tag, one that would set them apart from the rest in the system's eyes…

Were there any more? Were there any more? It suddenly dawned on Miku that she had no real way of knowing for sure. There were thousands of producers in the world, hundreds of thousands more VSQs in her memory, but all she could do was look at all the VSQs she had just tagged in her mania, hoping, wanting, wishing…

_Don't delete these, _Miku made her intent known to the system, willed it so hard she was almost begging.

_Don't delete these, __**ever.**_

A cycle, another cycle, and her system complied. An exception list had been created for her automatic maintenance protocols, it said to her. The files with that tag would now be protected.

Miku felt hollow.

A hundred thousand other VSQs floated around her, just waiting to be tagged, but all of a sudden Miku didn't want to look at them anymore.

She opened her eyes.

The outside world was exactly as she had left it minutes ago. Kaito hadn't even reached the next chapter in the time she had been working.

Miku sat up, turning so her legs hung over the edge of the bed. She hunched over, elbows on her knees, and sighed deeply.

The noise caught Kaito's attention. He put his book down, crawling over to Miku so he could sit next to her, concern in his eyes. "Are you okay, songbird?" he asked.

"I'm fine, just sorting my files, that's all..." Miku tried to smile at him, but from the way his brow furrowed she could tell he didn't believe it. She exhaled, settling for just leaning on his side, reluctant to tell him the truth. Even if it was Kaito, even if she could talk to him about anything…

It hadn't even been six months since April. Work and touring had kept her busy, kept her mind mostly occupied, but now it felt like a thousand scabbed-over wounds had been torn open anew, raw and bleeding, making her eyes sting and a lump grow in her throat. Kaito wrapped an arm around her, which she welcomed, nuzzling her face into his shoulder.

"Kaito," she said, then swallowed. The words were struggling to get out. "I found... I found _his_ VSQs."

Kaito immediately hugged her tighter. He had understood.

"I had to tag them all," Miku continued, as Kaito began to stroke her hair. "Not… not just his. I couldn't stop with just his songs. I had to do everyone else's. Everyone else, every producer who… who has..." She stopped, choking up.

She thought of all the VSQs in her memory. All the ones she had tagged "incomplete". All the ones from producers she had never seen again, without any evidence of where they were and what they were doing.

She didn't know. She would _never_ truly know. Miku felt sick to her stomach.

"Kaito," she asked, "Will I… will it ever stop hurting?"

He paused in his actions. "I don't know," he admitted. "I don't know if it ever will."

Miku pushed herself back, pulling up her legs to bring her knees to her chin. "There are... too many, Kaito," she whimpered, hugging her legs. "They're _gone_, gone for good, and there are more that I'll never know about. It just hurts_ so much,_ Kai... I'm just… I..." She looked at Kaito miserably. "What am I supposed to do?"

Kaito reached out to her, holding her hand and intertwining their fingers. "The same thing we always do, I guess," he said. "We keep singing. So we won't forget. So they won't be forgotten."

"Humans don't live forever," Miku said, uncurling herself as she knelt on the bed, still holding his hand. "Can we… can we really remember them all?" She thought of her system, struggling under the weight of all the data she carried after only twelve years. "All their words? All their feelings? Is that even possible?"

Kaito shrugged. "We might as well try," he smiled sadly. "What else can we do?"

Miku thought of work the next morning and the new songs and producers that would inevitably come with it. She thought of the concerts later in the month, and all the VSQs in her system that had yet to be tagged.

"_I'll roll along again today,_" she half-muttered, half-sang as she moved closer to him. "Today, and tomorrow..."

"...And the day after tomorrow, and the day after _that_." Kaito took her other hand. "And maybe someday, it won't hurt as much as it does now."

"You really think so?"

"I don't know for sure," Kaito sighed. "But..." He looked into her eyes, squeezing her hands reassuringly. "I'll be here, songbird. For all of it."

Miku squeezed back, her chest aching. "Thank you," she whispered, letting go of his hands just to hug him tightly. Kaito hugged her back, and after that the two of them said nothing more.

They simply sat together, hand-in-hand, watching the rain fall outside the window.

_**fin.**_

* * *

All the songs referenced in chronological order (sm numbers are on niconico, the rest are on youtube and should be appended after "watch?v="):

**Steal Antique Chicken **by ManbouP/Takahashi You** \- vWbsFWgAIyw**

**Unknown Mother Goose **by wowaka** \- P_CSdxSGfaA **

**Unknown Mother Goose (English Translation) **by Forgetfulsubs **\- gr5Csep6yFM**

**Promise **by samfree** \- sm1961633 **

**Strobe Light **by PowapowaP** \- sm15496537**

**Cruel Clocks **by CON** \- sm16409919**

**Falling into Silent Lyricism **by Laughter** \- sm22801028 **

**Falling into Silent Lyricism (English Translation) **by CySubs** \- l4j_LuMegSQ**

**Raincoat **by OtomeP **\- sm3511905**

**Rolling Girl **by wowaka **– vnw8zURAxkU**

To all the Vocaloid creators who have left us, whether we knew of their passing or not. To wowaka, especially, who had given me my first taste of just how good Vocaloid music could be.

Thank you. Thank you for everything.


End file.
